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Thursday, 17 November 2011

The combined power of the nifty iPad app Instapaper and an hour-long commute has helped me catch up on some bookmarked game design articles I had been intending to read for a while.

As I consume them I tend to pick out little nuggets of wisdom which I feel compelled to share. This may or may not become a regular feature, who knows?

I'll let the nuggets speak for themselves (except my bold highlights) and simply provide a link to the full article for those interested in further reading.

The intrinsic motivators of power and curiosity are at odds with each other. The more you are motivated by curiosity, the stronger the desire to test your new understanding becomes. And against increasingly difficult challenges, the more you fail, the more motivated you become to switch over to an learning playstyle to build your skills up. As this pendulum of motivation swings back and forth, it can be very stressful and dangerous to fun if the user is significantly restricted from freely moving between these motivations. Being forced to learn when one expects to flex or being prevented from learning when one desires to understand can cause players to lose motivation and therefore lose play and fun.

Wednesday, 16 November 2011

An argument for why the industry needs to encourage fresh perspectives on the games we make:

I'm just saying my misunderstanding of the games industry, as a non-gamer, coming in making games -- I was taking the subject matter and the content in the cutscenes seriously. I was honestly looking for the stories that are on the back of the box, or the media, the propaganda, that they put out about the game.

I was thinking, "Oh, all this content is in there somewhere, and I just have to find it and I'm missing it," whatever. When in actuality, no, they really want to make another fucking first-person shooter. That's amazing to me. Still, to this day, I'm amazed by that.

Auriea Harvey (Tale Of Tales)

Full interview with Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn can be found on Gamasutra.